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Filtered By: - Clear All

10% - What Makes a Hero?

Checkpoint (SFJFF 2004) and Defamation (SFJFF 2009) established Israeli documentarian Yoav Shamir as an unapologetic provocateur. Michael Moore executive produced the filmmaker’s newest film, a globetrotting quest to identify the shared characteristics of heroic individuals. From a bonobo preserve in Congo to the suburban home of a Flemish woman whose family harbored Jews during WWII, Shamir takes viewers on a fascinating journey that is sure to spark thoughtful conversation and passionate debate.

1945

In this astonishingly haunting film, deep undercurrents run beneath the simple surface in a quaint village that's ultimately forced to face up to its "ill-gotten gains" from the Second World War.

200 Meters - SFJFF41 Centerpiece Narrative

A Palestinian father embarks on a perilous journey to reach his hospitalized son in this tense yet tender family drama about the human toll of oppression.

93Queen

A cohort of bold ultraorthodox Jewish women battle to create their own all-female ambulance corps.

A Father's Kaddish

A FATHER'S KADDISH tells the story of how Steven Branfman used the art of pottery to help him work through his grief after the death of his 23-year-old son. The film is a potent and moving journey through the universal experience of loss, mourning and rebuilding a life.

A Fortunate Man

In the late 19th century, Peter Sidenius is an ambitious young man from a devout Christian family in Western Denmark, who travels to the Danish capital of Copenhagen to study engineering, rebelling against his clergyman father. He comes into contact with the intellectual circles of a wealthy, Jewish family and seduces the elder daughter, Jakobe. Per, as he now calls himself, conceives a large-scale engineering project including the construction of a series of canals in his native Jutland, and lobbies for its construction. But just as Per seems to be about to make his dreams come true, his pride stands in the way.

Abe | Film & Feast

The Israeli-Jewish side of his family calls him Avram. The Palestinian-Muslim side Ibrahim. His first-generation American agnostic lawyer parents call him Abraham. But the 12-year-old kid from Brooklyn who loves food and cooking, prefers, well, Abe. Just Abe.

Absolutely No Spitting

"So, you know how I told you to never spit? And that you're not allowed to spit and you shouldn't spit? SO... I need you to spit" And thus begins a very quirky, sometimes self-deprecating, and always heymish spit-driven DNA-journey-turned-love-letter between Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand, a fifty-something new old mom, and her much beloved and very spunky four-and-a-half-year-old adopted daughter Theo. And thank G-d they call NYC home - because it's the perfect place to embrace life as a multi-racial, multi-cultural, pan-global family.

Adam

Directed by Transparent producer Rhys Ernst and adapted by Ariel Schrag from her novel of the same name, Adam drops us down in the hipster lesbian and trans culture of Brooklyn, 2006. It’s essentially a coming-of-age story about a 17-year-old straight, cisgender male who falls in love with a lesbian after she mistakes him for a transgender man. Adam decides to maintain this Shakespearean deception and a satirical and nuanced exploration of identity ensues.

Adventures of a Mathematician

Based on the autobiography by Polish-Jewish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, ADVENTURES OF A MATHEMATICIAN follows Ulam’s dramatic journey to the United States in the 1930s where he plays a vital role in The Manhattan Project in the creation of the hydrogen bomb while desperately trying to help his sister flee Nazi occupied Poland.

Adventures of Saul Bellow, The

The Adventures of Saul Bellow is the first-ever documentary film on Bellow, the man described by critic James Wood as the "greatest of American prose stylists in the 20th century."

Africa

Struggling with life post-retirement, 68-year-old Meir fights to restore his shaken sense of self. Director Oren Gerner blurs the lines between documentary and fiction, casting his own father as a man struggling against irrelevance and decline. Preceded by the short film, Long Distance.

Afterward

Ofra Bloch, a New York-based psychoanalyst specializing in trauma, was born in Jerusalem to a Jewish family that emigrated to Palestine in the 1920s. Disturbed by the resurgence of fascism and anti-Semitism around the world, Ofra travels to Germany, Israel, and Palestine to confront her own deep-seated feelings about Germans and Palestinians, and the tensions between the Holocaust and the Nakba. In the process, she explores the nature of resistance and the possibility of hope.

ALINA

As Nazis separate children from their parents in the Warsaw Ghetto, a gang of women risks everything to smuggle their friend's three-month-old baby to safety.

American Factory

In 2014, a Chinese billionaire opened a Fuyao factory in a shuttered General Motors plant in Dayton, Ohio. For thousands of locals, the arrival of this multinational car-glass manufacturer meant regaining their jobs - and dignity - after the recession left them high and dry. American Factory takes us inside the facility to observe what happens when workers from profoundly different cultures collide.

As I AM: The Life and Times of DJ AM

Forget whatever you’ve heard about the life and death of Philadelphia-born DJ AM (born Adam Goldstein), the superstar club deejay who attained rock star status and survived a fiery plane crash only to die a short time later of a drug overdose at the age of 36. Director Kevin Kerslake’s haunting and heartbreaking portrait intimately conveys the brief life of an obsessive sonic genius for whom music, fame and love were tragically not enough.

Baby Face

Baby Face is a provocative pre-Code film starring Barbara Stanwyck as Lily Powers. who “sleeps her way to the top.”

Barney's Version

Toward the end of his life, Barney Panofsky (Paul Giamatti) looks back on his triumphs and tragedies, beginning with an ill-fated relationship with Clara (Rachelle Lefevre), whom he marries when she becomes pregnant.

Beaufort

Near the end of the war in Lebanon, a group of Israeli soldiers defends an isolated mountain outpost next to a 12th-century fortress called Beaufort Castle.

Bedlam

BEDLAM is a feature-length documentary that addresses the national crisis and criminalization of the mentally ill, its connection between hundreds of thousands of homeless Americans and our nation’s disastrous approach to caring for its psychiatric patients.

Bee Season

In the Naumann household, 11-year-old Eliza (Flora Cross) feels she has little to offer in a family of overachievers. All that changes when she wins the spelling bee, much to the surprise of everyone.

Before You Know It

Stage manager Rachel Gurner still lives in her childhood apartment - along with her off-kilter actress sister, Jackie; eccentric playwright father Mel; and deadpan preteen niece Dodge - above the tiny theatre they own and operate. Level-headed and turtleneck-wearing Rachel is the only thing standing between her family and utter chaos. Then, in the wake of a sudden family tragedy, Rachel and Jackie learn their presumed-deceased mother is actually alive and thriving as a soap-opera star. Now the sisters' already-precarious balance turns upside down, and Rachel must figure out how to liberate herself from this surreal imbroglio. Co-writer/director/star Hannah Pearl Utt is a triple threat with an impeccable sense of timing and a flair for juxtaposing unpredictable elements. Just as pragmatic Rachel and off-the-wall Jackie seem to hail from different planets while inhabiting the same universe, so too do the film's over-the-top moments and characters coexist alongside subtle, grounded ones. Equal parts madcap comedy, adult coming-of-age story, and poignant drama, Before You Know It gleefully defies categorization, and that is its genius.

Ben Lee: Catch My Disease

At the age of 14 a nice Jewish boy from Sydney, Australia, became a rock star, and at 16, an international pop star. His name is Ben Lee and like his music, he's still evolving. Featuring interviews with his former girlfriend Claire Danes and friends Winona Ryder, Jason Schwartzman and Michelle Williams, Ben Lee: Catch My Disease is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist’s evolution. [MINIGUIDE 67/70]

Blue Box

The Jewish National Fund's ubiquitous Blue Boxes were an internationally successful fundraising campaign to support the purchase and forestation of land in Israel. This thought-provoking documentary focuses on Joseph Weits, a seminal figure in the growth of the organization, its tree-planting programs and the subsequent myth-building of a national narrative.

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